Document Mgt Roll-up: BlackBerry for Office 365

Last week was a busy one for conferences, but it was also a busy week for document management. BlackBerry users will be able to have access to Office 365 documents in beta, Colligo offers document management for SharePoint, eFileCabinet heads to the cloud, LibreOffice celebrates its first birthday and Version One partners with Intuitive.

BlackBerry Cloud for Office 365

As yet, Office 365 is still not available to BlackBerry cloud services users, at least not generally. However, while general access is slated for January next year, Research in Motion (RIM) has announced that it is now accepting applications for participants in the Open Beta Program that is starting this month.

RIM and Microsoft announced last year that the price of the hosted Blackberry service would be cut to zero and that the Office 365 Blackberry service would be launching later in calendar 2011.

According to the Office 365 blog, anyone interested should be getting in contact now, but to keep in mind that as it is a beta service “…like any pre-release service, there may be occasional service interruptions and maintenance requiring temporary system downtime…”.

If you want to find out more about this check out the Office 365 blog, where you will be able to find out how to enable your Microsoft Office 365 for BlackBerry service.

LibreOffice Celebrates First Birthday

Meanwhile, the Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice.

According to Charles Schulz, despite all the predicted problems when the fork was announced last year, LibreOffice.org has been a success.

…we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers …many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide,” he said.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the day of availability of the first stable release, have just exceeded 6 million from 81 TDF mirrors, and amount to 7.5 million when you add external sites (like Softpedia) offering the same package.

In addition, there are more users who install LibreOffice from a CD burned from the ISO images available online or bundled with a magazine. TDF estimates that there are 10 million users worldwide having installed from downloads and CDs. Over 90% of those are on Windows, with another 5% on MacOS.

Linux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2011, TDF estimates a subtotal of 15 million Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

TDF, as a result, calculates that there are a total of 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide, in line with the expectations and well on the way to the target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of the decade.

Colligo Unveils DM for SharePoint

Last week was SharePoint week. There were a lot of announcements but from a document management perspective, one of the more interesting items was from Colligo.

Colligo released an eight-product integrated suite of email and document management applications that covers just about every enterprise SharePoint need conceivable across PCs, tablets, and laptops.

The suite can be deployed and managed for both on-premise and cloud-based SharePoint installations, which, of course, also means a tie-up with Office 365.

Of course, this is not Colligo’s first trip down this road, but at Anaheim it has introduced three products into the SharePoint management suite that should make things easier for companies trying to manage this.

The new products extend the functionality of the existing Colligo Contributor suite, which supports both on-premise SharePoint (2003/07/10) and Microsoft Office 365, and which enables users to file email messages to SharePoint on any mobile device connected to Exchange as well as offering extensive online and offline functionality.

eFileCabinet Turns to the Cloud

eFileCabinet has also been busy. Over the week it announced the release of eFileCabinet Online, a cloud-based version of its document management solution.

The new product, eFile Cabinet says, is a robust, easy-to-use collaboration tool that not only enables the secure storing, sharing and routing of important documents, but also comes with the ability to notify and remind users of critical file related tasks

Any organization that manages a physical file cabinet will realize significant savings in both time and money by utilizing eFileCabinet Online.

Like eFileCabinet Desktop, the document management solution parallels the physical file cabinet in digital format and provides users with a central repository to capture, manage, protect and share their business files. Because eFileCabinet Online is a SaaS model, users are not tethered to their local network and can have access to all of their files anywhere they have an Internet connection. Potential users can choose from three subscription plans or sign up for a free 14-day trial.

Version One Partners With Intuitive

Finally, Version One continues to expand its horizons, this time with a new partnership with Intuitive Business Intelligence, the author of advanced business intelligence (BI) dashboard solution, Intuitive Dashboards.

Version One says the partnership has been formed in response to rapidly-growing demand for dashboard-integrated document imaging functionality.

Intuitive Business Intelligence’s flagship product, Intuitive Dashboards, enables access to business-critical information, and the integration of Version One’s document imaging software into Intuitive Dashboards will enable users to drill down through the data and gain access to any related imaged business documents.

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